Proper Disrespect for False Authority

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Having noted that, I was musing on the Boston incident a bit more at gym. The morning’s podcast was an episode of the CBC’s "Best of Ideas" from last october – their LONG holidays encourage me to stock up for the dry spell – that was unmemorable except for some commentary on dung beetles and how they use their dung to cool off. I was enthralled to learn that there are some 6K species of dung beetles Tellus-wide but that most of them burrow under the dung and hide. Only a few are ball rollers and they all proceed backwards.

This, of course, led me to contemplate the state of contemporary journalism, since journalists are so much like dung beetles. In particular, I quickly moved on to an aspect beyond their control that may account for the low trust had in them by the majority of humanity.

Communication today is very fast, the fastest it has ever been, but that electronic speed has not been uniformly enjoyed. One area still plodding is bureaucracy, especially the legal system. And that is the root of the discontent.

The media vastly reported the Boston incident yesterday, itself less damaging of people and property than several interstate pile ups in recent weeks but somehow meriting orders of magnitude more time and rhetoric. Still, well and good, for it was NEWS.

The coverage continues today, with the same content, almost nothing new, and that is NOT news. But it still commands time and rhetoric. The constabulary, hindered by numerous bureaucratic instrumentalities of the Massachusets and Yankee governments, has begun their work but that is not news; that is normality. And it will be a long time for any results to emerge and anything positive, at least from the standpoint of the cozened public, will be accidental. And accidents are random.

But we shall continue to be assailed and our time wasted and our needs for information denied by this repetition that will continue long after it has eroded to nothing but irritation.

Because there will be nothing substantive to report.

Because the mediaists feel the need to report something even if it is already known by almost all the adults humans in the nation.